A Balanced Approach for a Highly Engaged Team

Many organizations recognize that highly engaged employees create dramatically higher levels of customer satisfaction. Highly engaged employees are less likely to quit and leave — or to quit and stay. A workplace with engaged employees is 2 – 3 times safer, more productive, creative, and producing much higher quality.

Zenger Folkman research clearly shows that one variable is the best predictor of employee engagement, satisfaction, and commitment. And that’s the daily leadership provided in the workplace. People join organizations and quit their leaders.

To increase leadership effectiveness that increases employee engagement there’s often a debate about which works best: a management push or leadership pull? This leads right into the “tyranny-of-the-OR” trap. This black and white thinking sees it as one or the other. It’s especially tempting to believe that creating an inspiring and motivating environment through a leadership pull approach will lead to much higher employee engagement than management push.

Here’s where Zenger Folkman’s extensive research shines a light on this vital performance topic. In his blog, The Push and Pull of Employee Engagement at Ivy Exec, Joe Folkman reports on the results of a study of 160,576 employees reporting into 20,597 teams or work groups and the effectiveness of their immediate leader’s effectiveness on pushing and pulling. These surprising conclusions emerged:

“If a leader was not highly skilled (at the top quartile) at either pushing or pulling the average employee, engagement scores for that group were at the 42nd percentile. In other words they were below average.

If a leader was highly skilled at pushing (e.g., top quartile) but not at pulling the average employee, engagement scores for that group were at the 61st percentile … on the other hand, if a leader was highly skilled at pulling (e.g., top quartile) but not at pushing, the average employee engagement scores for that group were at the 63rd percentile. This is better, but not by much.

The magic formula here is when leaders were highly skilled (e.g., top quartile) at both pushing and pulling. When this occurred the average employee engagement scores for that group were at the 76th percentile. These work groups were at the coveted top quartile level in terms of their satisfaction, engagement, and commitment.”

So we need to develop “and-also” skills rather than an “either-or” approach for highly engaged employees. As the Danish physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics observed, “the opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

For over 30 years, Jim Clemmer’s practical leadership approaches have been inspiring action and achieving results. He has delivered thousands of keynote presentations, workshops, and management team retreats to hundreds of organizations around the globe moving his audiences from inspiration to application. He’s listed in the World’s Top 30 Most Influential Leadership Gurus based on research with 22,000 global business people, consultants, academics and MBAs. His website is www.JimClemmer.com.